data center

Two employees working in a control room

Co-ops in the age of AI

The story is well known to anyone familiar with electric cooperatives: People living in rural areas in the 1930s and ’40s couldn’t enjoy the benefits of electricity in their homes and on their farms because bringing power out into the countryside was a complicated and expen

Co-ops were early adopters of AMR (automated meter reading) and AMI (advanced metering infrastructure), which automate tasks as mundane as reading a meter or finding the location of an outage. In a big city, that might take a few minutes for a utility crew, but co-op crews might have to drive for a couple of hours to do the same thing. If technology can eliminate that two-hour trip, it’s safer for employees, minimizes outage times, and saves members money.

Power Lines
Inside a data center

Demanding

Near New Albany, within about three miles of one another, stand three buildings — modern but rather plain and, but for their size, could even be described as nondescript. But you can hardly overlook the high-voltage power lines that dominate the space next to them. 

They are also super-sized users of electricity. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, data centers can consume as much as 50 times the energy per floor space as other types of commercial buildings. By themselves, each of those three centers near New Albany draws more power from the grid at any given moment than most of Ohio’s 24 local electric cooperatives draw at their peak. 

Power Lines
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